After Pee Wee and ‘Tonight, Tonight,’ Artist Wayne White Is Reborn

Wayne White hit it big as the puppet master who enlivened Paul Reuben's famously insane Pee Wee's Playhouse TV show. But as chronicled in Neil Berkeley's new documentary Beauty is Embarrassing (currently in limited theaters; opens in wider release today), the self-taught puppeteer, illustrator/animator/banjo player/sculptor/cartoonist/set designer went through a tough post-Pee Wee period in Hollywood before re-discovering his creative mojo as a artist whose re-worked thrift store "word paintings" now sell for thousands of dollars.

We recently chatted with White about his early days with Pee Wee, Peter Gabriel and Smashing Pumpkins, the rough times that followed, and how he finally found peace with his paintbrush; click through the gallery to follow his tale.

Puppeteering Pee Wee's Playhouse

"I've always had the do-it-yourself approach," White told Wired Design. "I grew up in this blue collar family and didn't have a lot of toys, so you had to make your own fun. Building forts out of sticks and scrap lumber - - that's where I learned the joy of making something from nothing."

In college White carved puppets out of discarded foam rubber and staged wild punk rock- inspired shows with a coterie of "weirdo" classmates. "Our puppets pumped out copious amounts of blood," he said. "We threw bowls of cheerios and milk at the audience, we set fire to the stage, used firecrackers and attacked people during the performance. We were all about de-constructing the idea of a genteel puppet show."

Galvanized by the blistering graphic assaults featured in alternative comics bible Raw Magazine, White graduated from Middle Tennessee University and headed for New York. There he found work as an illustrator, hung out at the School for Visual Arts with Raw editor Art Spiegelman, and trawled the streets for puppet fodder. "I'd rip foam rubber from old couches and hack away at it with scissors to build puppet heads, or I'd find existing forms like oven mitts and build the puppet around that. I couldn't sew, so if I used cloth, I'd hot-glue it. I like the rough and ready construction techniques. "

White's one-man puppet shows earned him a gig in 1986 helping to launch Pee Wee's Playhouse. "It was a downtown New York art project that just happened to get on national TV," White recalled. "We were all new to our jobs. We were not a professional Hollywood crew. We were underground cartoonists and painters and sculptures, and I faked my way into being the puppet master on the show, even though I'd only been doing my own do-it-yourself stuff."

The first season of Pee Wee's Playhouse was shot on the fourth story of a Manhattan loft building that used to be a sweat shop. "We cleared out the old sewing machines, hung sound blankets over the windows and of course it was filthy with grime and dust everywhere," White recalled.

The ceilings were too low for standard rigging, so White operated marionettes from a diving board-like plank cantilevered over the stage out of camera view. "That was the power of the Playhouse," he said. "Make it up as you go along. There's risk, but also a sense of innovation that goes with that. "

Photo: Courtesy Wayne White

Marionettes and Motivation

For Pee Wee's Playhouse, White made and performed several star marionettes including squeaky-voiced "Randy."

"I carved Randy's head out of solid chunk of white pine that weighed 10 to 15 pounds," he said. "It was way too heavy the balance was way off. I'd drop Randy into the scene on monofilament line and his head would start spinning around uncontrollably like 'The Exorcist,' and they'd be like 'Cut, what's wrong!' 'I don't know, none of my other marionettes did this.' "

"I'd never built a marionette in my life. I learned on the job. Sheer panic is a real motivator."

Photo: Courtesy Wayne White

Peter Gabriel: Good Boss

Projects like Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" music video and the Ringo Starr-hosted Shining Time Station proved to be exceptions to the rule, White said. "I had a few successes but in between were dismal failure and ridiculously bad ideas."

White devised the art direction for "Big Time." "I had great teams of claymation and stop motion animators at my disposal and they were literally my palette. I asked myself, 'What looks great as clay? Earth, mud and stuff, and grass and moss, they can work with that,' so when I did the drawings, I'd think of the materials they could be translated into."

The "Big Time" project illustrates a key piece of advice that White offers to young artists and designers. "Find a good boss," White said. "Peter Gabriel left me alone. He did not edit me, censor me or steer me one way or another. He just said, 'Go for it.' When you have these productions you need a champion who can insulate you from the big boss, the worriers who think what you're doing is too far out or won't make money."

As seen in the documentary, White speaks from experience. "You want someone who is intelligent enough to give constructive criticism, not criticism that's based on repeating a formula. For artists, the formula is death. So, yeah, find a good boss."

Smashing Pumpkins

White earned an art direction Grammy Award for art-directing Smashing Pumpkins' 1996 "Tonight, Tonight" music video inspired by George Méliès' sci-fi silent film A Trip to the Moon. "That was done the old fashioned way," he said. "The rocket ship and the props were just painted plywood with a little cloth here and there. We wanted to do it the way Méliès would have done it in Paris in 1904."

"They began as paintings that I did on canvas and illustration board," White continued. "I handed them over to the set constructors and they broke them down as a series of flats. In digital post-production they collaged it all together, but the physical sets were as simple as that. The power of that video is that it springs directly from paintings done with real paint on real canvas, and real board - - and real whipped cream," White adds, referring to the material used to construct the music video's moon.

White's Painting Revival

After five or six years of pitch meetings that led nowhere, Wayne hit a funk.

Married to artist Mimi Pond and with two children to support, White worked himself to exhaustion, going without sleep for days at a time to produce a computer-animated TV product. "I did it for the money, to raise my kids and pay the mortgage and stuff. That's when the dark time started for me. Doing animation on a computer, I wanted to make as much money as possible so I didn't hire an assistant, so I could make all the money. It drove me into a state of depression."

Finally, in the early 2000s, White got back to basics.

"I had to burn myself out on the Hollywood system to understand that what I really wanted to do was create my own art in a studio by myself. For my own survival, I had to step back from it all and that's when I started painting again," said White.

His paintings, reproduced in the 2009 book Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve" (edited by designer Todd Oldham), represented a rebirth for White.

"I was intimidated from years in television being known as the kiddie show designer. I had no confidence in approaching the art world. When I started showing the paintings at Fred 62 coffee shop and immediately started selling them right off the walls, that gave me confidence to approach a gallery – Cliff Benjamin. That was the kicker. I got off the happy pills, and that really lifted the depression, just being accepted like that, finally somebody who did see the possibilities, who did see me. That was my second, uh, rising, yeah.

White uses mass-produced landscape paintings he finds in thrift stores as the foundation for pithy slogans he writes down in a notebook. "It's about the duality of it all, where you have a bucolic, academic, safe kind of lovely picture invaded by everyday profanity and banality and vulgarity. I like to put the two together where you take something low – a thrift store painting – and putting it into the so-called high world of fine art."

Photo: Courtesy Wayne White

Making Beauty is Embarrassing

Beauty is Embarrassing follows White to a Tennessee prep school where he makes a giant puppet of a venerated academy official in two days.

"I showed up and it was basically just a dumpster full of cardboard and a big long bamboo pole to hoise the puppet on," White said. "I took the cardboard and came up with that strip construction of the face out of necessity, to make it lightweight and because we didn't have that much cardboard. Lo and behold, on the spot, I came up with this new method of construction for me, just because I was under the gun to do this in two days. Limited resources, I think, is a real inspiration for creativity. Limits make your mind find solutions that you wouldn't normally think of."